Reach for the Stars: A 150-turn game

My previous post about Reach for the Stars described a full play session of the shortest, simplest game, in a manner to explain gameplay mechanics while also providing a narrative of a successful galactic conquest within those parameters. 40 turns isn't nearly long enough to conquer the entire galaxy against the hardest AI setting - at that duration you're just looking to outscore your opponents, which, as I discovered, is best done by achieving small victories early on.

For my final post on the topic, I played through a full 150 turn game, hoping to truly dominate the galaxy, Master of Orion-style, with all of the optional play features turned on.

This time, I thought I'd try a strategy that focuses on expansion and defense. I figured that peaceful colonization would be more beneficial over time, and if I could just outpace my rivals, then I could take them all down with an unstoppable endgame fleet.

The setup menu

The random star map

Start of turn 1

With the "task force setup" option, you begin in the middle of space with no planet. This is the only time in the game that your ships exist anywhere other than on a planet, and they don't even appear on the map; pressing Enter just automatically selects the task force so that you can give them orders. The sooner you find a suitable planet for a first colony, the better.

The "solar debris" effect slows down exploration and travel considerably. Ship movement, though invisible to you, is still hex-based, and when a ship enters a cloud of violet debris, it stops all movement and ends its turn there. In the above screenshot, sending an explorer directly to Shedir, the green star to the north, would take three turns.

Frustratingly, the auto-explore doesn't take this into account and just sends explorers to the nearest unexplored star regardless of how long it will take to get there. Nor can you manually override a ship's path and tell it to fly around the debris instead of through it. The best you could do here is to send a ship to the white star to the east and then on the next turn send it to the green one, making the journey in two turns instead of three.

Too tedious for me, though. I had the explorers auto-explore as usual, but sent the transports and warships to the nearby white star Alhena, as white stars have the best odds of Primary quality planets.

Turn 2 revealed no luck. Alhena had nothing but a tertiary planet. Nor did my other explorers find anything worthwhile. One of them was on its slow, merry way to Shedir, stuck in debris. Subsequent auto-explore was also proving weirdly inefficient, as it routinely sent multiple explorers to the same destination.

By turn 4, the Shedir-bound explorer arrived, and it did indeed have a Primary planet. By turn 6 I made planetfall, and allocated my meager resources on this undeveloped world according to math.

f(x) = x*(6+(276-38-10*x)/4)/16
f'(x) = 4.09375 - 5*x/16

Building up this planet was slow. Without any existing infrastructure to begin with except for what little I could buy with my starting RP reserve, and nothing to ship in offworld, I'd have to gradually expand industry and social structure. By turn 17, I had 28/40 factories, 67 social points, and was producing 133 RP's per turn.

I also noticed, on this turn, that my population was curiously low, at only 8/95. My homeworld had apparently been struck by a natural disaster, which will happen randomly without warning. The suddenly reduced population is the only indication that this has happened. Could have been worse - industry and social points are honestly much more valuable.

Exploring, on the other hand, was not slow at all. Once my explorers got out of the cluster of debris in the middle of the map, planet charting expanded at a rapid pace. By this same turn, I had all worlds explored, 17 of them Primary quality, and had transports parked at or en route to all but the few that I was certain had my rival's homeworlds, as my explorers sent there had mysteriously vanished. These planets were Phaeda and Castor, plus Vega, a tertiary world that I expect an unlucky player had to settle for. 

Only by turn 23 did I feel Schedar was developed enough to start colonizing a new world.

Preparing to max out economy stats while building a small colony fleet.

In the meantime, my transports at Almak and Thuban had been driven out by other colony fleets from players 2 and 4. I was behind schedule!

Etamin, with its 40 industry and 95 maximum population, just like Shedir, seemed to be the best candidate for my second colony. Naturally, Almak and Thuban were even better. As my colony fleet flew, I saved up money on Shedir so that it could kickstart my new colony's economy when it arrived. Also during this time, player three took Mirzam.

Etamin colonized on turn 27. With savings from Shedir I can buy 30/40 factories immediately and have 100 points left for social level.

Etamin on turn 31. Despite the low population it is almost self-sufficient, and I can start investing in defense.

With Shedir producing more resources than I could spend on Etamin, I built another colonizing fleet to send to Regulus, and the very same turn, Etamin got attacked by a colonizing fleet, taking out all but two of its warships. It was time to get serious about defense.

By turn 41, I had colonized six planets, and a seventh was underway.

• Shedir - My fully developed homeworld was generating 300 RP/turn easily, and with 47/95 population was even recovering from the disaster. Defense beyond a token warship fleet seemed yet unnecessary.
  
• Etamin - Fully developed economy, generating 267 RP/turn, but under constant attack from Player Four. At the start of this turn, it was interdicted, which is a very bad thing when the economy is still developing as it means the planet can't access the global RP pool, but for Etamin it wasn't too terrible. PDB's at least prevented the interdicting fleet from landing, but interdiction typically precedes a larger assault. I also noticed that player 4 had colonized its crappy neighboring planet. I built more warships in preparation for a storm.
• Regulus - Global RP's allowed me to max out its industrial capacity in short order, and social/planetary development could follow.
• Rigel - Like Regulus, but this planet came developed already, saving me a good amount of money developing the planet environment.
  
• Zosma - A recently colonized planet, but I could easily afford the maximum allotment of industry, social, and planetary development for the turn.
• Procyon - Another recently colonized planet. After pumping Zosma's economy, I no longer had enough reserves to maximize everything and had to figure out the optimal investments.
• Altair - Colonists inbound.

 

The turn's end proved my intuitions about Shedir very wrong, as an inbound fleet from Player Three with M2 warships obliterated my pathetic orbital guard and started bombarding the world below. Player Two sent their M2 warships against similarly under-defended Regulus as well. Meanwhile, the newly commissioned warships at Etamin drove off the interdicting fleet, and then I bombarded their unfriendly outpost before it could become a threat.

At Regulus and Shedir, I scrambled to build more warships to put up some token resistance against the invading fleets while pouring the other planets' resource points into ship development.

This worked, and I was able to develop M2 warships of my own and repel these invasions, but even as I started to rebuild, Player Three sent a large invasion force to Zosma that I had no hope of defense against.

Oh well. Zosma was lost, but at least Player Three was stuck with an inefficient conquest world. I could focus on developing what I had left.

By turn 49, things felt reasonably stable again, and I continued expansion. I lost Altair in another surprise attack to Player Three's colony fleet, but gained four new worlds in the turns to come. One of them, though, had Xenophobes - unfightable invaders that block access to global RP's, making rapid development of its economy impossible until they left.

With my developed colonies now producing money more rapidly than I could spent it offworld, and the supply of uninhabited primary worlds nearly exhausted, I started colonizing those less desirable secondary, tertiary, and even hostile worlds, starting with those neighboring my existing primary colonies.

The AI must have had a similar plan, as when I started sending out single transports as scouts, a few encountered enemy colony fleets. I took notes on who seemed to control what - I'd need as much information as possible when it came time to conquer the galaxy.

On turn 57, Player Three was at it again, attacking Regulus, this time with M3 warships! I hadn't lost the system yet, as no colony-settling transports were part of this group, but they took out all of my defenses, bombarded my factories, and left little hope of building any sort of retaliatory force. I wrote off the system as lost, and started investing in ship development in the hopes of catching up.

Player 2, meanwhile, had a more modest but still outmatching fleet attacking Rigel. I built up my PDB's there while continuing to research M3 warships. Curiously, Player 3 abandoned Regulus of his own accord, but Rigel fell.

On turn 63, I made an unpleasant discovery.

Player two had invaded Etamin's orbital space, and conquered a planet there right under my nose! Reach for the Stars doesn't alert you when this happens, as SSG's logic seems to be that if an event requires no immediate decisions on your part in order to resolve, then it's not worth bothering you.

With an interdicting fleet superior to anything I could build there in one turn, there was no easy path to taking it back. I'd have to build a liberating fleet at the closest free world, which thankfully wasn't too far away, and I was able to take back Etamin's space superiority right away, if not necessarily my planet. But Player Two just sent an even bigger fleet to re-decimate my defense force and PDB's.

And then one of my worlds, Mizar, suddenly started flashing, and I noticed that it was possible to build transports for my entire population save one. Mizar was about to go nova. So I sent everyone offworld. On the turn after, I rallied an even bigger fleet from Regulus to Etamin, and finding only a remnant of the previous fleet there, I beat it easily and took out the PDB's on its occupied planet, winning it back.

On turn 73, Mizar was gone, and Etamin and Deneb were starting to go nova too. And after all that effort to keep Etamin! Player Four soon attacked it with a fleet of 51 M3 warships, taking out all of the PDB's - keep it, I say.

Turn 75 was the halfpoint, and I checked the scoreboard.

Third place overall, and not far from the bottom, but I'm way ahead in colonial development, which I think bodes well for my long term strategy. Despite all the colonies I had lost, I still had planets on 16 star systems, though I was about to lose two of them. My expansion had been rapid and aggressive recently due to overpopulation.

• Etamin - Two planets, one primary, both colonized and partly developed, generating combined 466 RP/turn. Doomed to go nova, and besieged by a fleet that not only made rescue seem impossible, but even evacuation was impossible. I was ready to write them off, but perhaps not before investing in some PDB's just to hurt Player Four's fleet a bit before losing it.
• Regulus - One primary planet, fully developed, producing 288 RP/turn. Often on the brink of overpopulation, and therefore a source of new colony fleets.
• Nath - Two mediocre planets, both colonized and undeveloped.
• Pollux - Two planets, one primary, colonized, and partially developed, producing 116 RP/turn.
  
• Izar - Two mediocre planets, one colonized and undeveloped.
• Capella - One primary planet, almost fully developed and producing 152 RP/turn.
• Deneb - Two planets, both colonized. One primary, almost fully developed and producing 161 RP/turn, the other colonized but undeveloped. Shame about the nova.
• Acrux - One hostile planet, undeveloped.
• Mintaka - Two bad planets, one colonized and undeveloped.
• Shedir - My homeworld. Two planets, one primary and fully developed, producing 229 RP/turn, and like Regulus often crowded. It was time to populate its neighbor.
• Wesen - One tertiary planet, partially developed, producing 48 RP/turn.
• Procyon - Two planets, one primary, colonized, and fully developed, producing 170 RP/turn and getting crowded. Time to settle its secondary quality neighbor.
• Nunki - One tertiary planet, almost fully developed, producing 322 RP/turn.
• Sabik - One primary planet, fully developed, producing 136 RP/turn.
• Spica - One tertiary planet, undeveloped.
• Hamal - Two planets, one secondary, colonized, and partially developed, producing 134 RP/turn.

 

With so many planets in various states of development, building them up took a strange path. I'd begin each turn with a fairly large global RP pool, from all the unspent RP of fully developed planets of the previous turn. Fully developed planets would contribute to next turn's global RP pool. Partially developed planets' RP's would be used to further develop themselves, subsidized if necessary by the global RP pool, and undeveloped planets would get huge influxes from the RP pool to build them up quickly until it ran out. As more planets shifted from "undeveloped" to "partially developed" and "fully developed," I'd begin my turn with increasingly large RP pools and be able to assist more and more of my planets each turn, until the takers became makers.

I also noticed that my primary planets were usually not the biggest makers. They were reliably pretty good, as they're quick to develop thanks to good planetary environments, but my most productive planets were the tertiary world on Nunki and the hostile world on Etamin (sigh). This is because of industry. Primary planets can support up to 50 factories, secondary 60, tertiary 80, and the most industrious hostile planets, such as the one on Etamin, up to 100 factories. That isn't to say that all planets can be developed to that limit; the smallest maximum is 25, and that goes for all planet types. But planets with over 60 factories will always be tertiary or hostile.

The major downside is that hostile planets take time to develop. Primary planets can be maxed out quickly for not too much money; if you settle a planet that supports 50 factories, you can buy all of them the next turn for just 500 RP as there's no limit to how many factories you can buy in one turn except for what your budget allows. Maxing out social points will cost less than 400 RP, spent 100 per turn over the next four production cycle - how much less depends on how much it increases on its own thanks to the environment. It should only take a turn or two for the planet to become self sufficient, and within four turns should be fully optimized.

But now take a hostile planet that supports 100 factories and has a poor planetary environment. It would cost you 1000 RP to buy all those factories, and they wouldn't be very productive until the planet's social value rises to match. With a poor planetary value, you would need to raise it and the social value together, which could cost as much as 1200 RP to max out, and could take as many as 8 turns even if you invest the maximum allotment of 100 RP to both social and planet development on every single one of them.

On turn 77, Deneb and Etamin were no longer flashing, but now Nunki was. I don't get it - is going nova like a game of musical chairs? And once again the fleet attacking Etamin was gone.

I had 1098 RP in the global pool, and continued developing my worlds systematically. This was enough to give a major boost to three undeveloped worlds, instantly maxing out the industry of 2 of them while also giving them both the full social/planet allotment, and boosting the third's to 20/30 industry. As before, partially developed planets boosted themselves, the rest of the undeveloped planets fended for themselves, and fully developed planets banked RP for the next turn.

By turn 89, I had colonized every single planet that wasn't, to my knowledge, on a star system controlled by someone else. There was no more room for peaceful expansion, except for moving colonists from overpopulated planet to underpopulated planet. 22 star systems were mine, and I had colonized every planet one each of them. Occasionally an attacking fleet would come to an underdefended system, and I'd respond to that by dumping my entire global RP pool into M3 warships on the nearest planet and sending them over, which cost delayed my planets' development, but drove the enemy off every single time. Also during this time, Nunki had stabilized, and I had a few more false alarms, but Sabik went nova for real.

On the beginning of this turn I had 2184 RP in the global pool, with which I could fully industrialize 2 undeveloped planets, promote another from partially industrialized to full, and improve the development of 5 fully industrialized planets, while other partially developed planets improved themselves still. It was beginning to feel like my conquest phase was in sight.

On turn 101, with a starting pool of 2669 RP, I finally had more money than what could be spent on economy. I was also out of room to expand - excess population had to be loaded into transports and just floated over their own planets. I had lost Kochab, and Etamin was partially colonized by Player Four and stationed with M4 warships that had been bombarding the other world, even affecting its maximum capacity for industry and population, but I still had 32 planets in 20 secure systems, most of them fully industrialized, and enough funds to finish building the rest of them up and have something left over.

I was also in the lead, with 7962 victory points, 7762 of them from peaceful colonization.

It was time to begin the last phase. Once again, I invested in warship technology as I built up my planets to maximum stats. You can only invest 100 RP per planet per turn, but I had enough planets to get it in just the one turn. I started marshaling everything I had towards the Nunki system to begin my final conquest.

It's a start.

I systematically moved my fleet from planet to planet, easily defeating the ships there, and reinforcing it turn by turn with new ships built at the nearest friendly base, wherever that might be, plus an endless supply of transports, until I felt sure I could destroy its PDB's and land some transports.

Gonna need more than this to take on 30 PDB's.

Much better! Both planets here are mine. Again.

With enough transports you can even take on a few M4 warships.

 

As I went on the warpath, my opponents swarmed in on my nearly defenseless colonies, blockading and bombarding most of them, and soon my main fleet ran into Player Four's, forcing a withdrawal as they retook the planets I had just conquered. Money spent repairing damage from bombardment and overpopulation meant less available for my main fleet, and as all of the planets near the front were interdicted, I couldn't even provide timely reinforcements there any longer.

And the game, infuriatingly, does not directly tell you when your planets are under attack. If your fleets are attacked, then you'll know, but when your PDB's are attacked, the "combat" resolves very quickly without your input. When a colony is bombarded, you'll briefly see a ship icon over a star system - no visual indication on whether or not it's your star system - and hear an arcane beep. It's up to you to recognize the star's name from its position and interpret the beep. When a colony is invaded, you get nothing. In all cases, the best way to find out what happened is to assess the damage on your own turn, which demands that you keep notes on all of the planets you control. Needless to say, with over 30 planets on 20 systems, this is tedious.

I changed my plan to instead make Aludra, one of my few non-interdicted planets, the new rallying point for my death fleet. Blockaded planets would focus on building PDB's to delay or prevent invasion, and their own defense fleets when the blockading fleet was only a ship or two.

19 new M4 warships at Aludra.

Where ever the blockades were too powerful to defeat locally, I'd divert some relief from my main attack fleet. Some planets, though, especially remote ones under heavy attack, I'd just have to abandon. One of these planets was in such a bad spot that it overpopulated and couldn't even summon enough RP to transport people off of it.

With this approach, my conquest was slow, but generally outpaced the rate at which I lost my underdefended planets to my opponents. No matter how many I killed, enemy warships kept appearing, mostly in small numbers, around several of my planets every turn. PDB's weren't reliable for stopping even single-ship attackers, but the only thing that really helped was outnumbering their M4 warships with my own, and those are just too expensive to waste on passive defense. I'd rely on PDB's to slow down attackers until I could send relief from my main fleet. Often they'd all get completely destroyed without landing a single hit and have to be rebuilt the next turn after the planet withstood bombardment. Sometimes they'd slip in transports between rounds, costing me the planet - at this stage in the game, I didn't care to keep track of who controlled what every round any more. Sometimes they'd leave on their own. Sometimes the PDB's would annihilate my harriers, at least until the next wave of them cave. The point was to slow them down, and this seemed to work well enough to keep me in the lead. If nothing else, the frequent space battles earned me some big lump sums of victory points.

By turn 131, I had possessed 40 worlds on 25 systems, but my rate of expansion was slowing, not accelerating. As so many empires in history had learned, you can't have a strong defense everywhere, and I was losing planets almost as fast as I was conquering them. Even if you were to focus entirely on defense, no planet can defend itself from a truly determined attacker on its own, and there were three independent empires now concentrating their efforts on punching holes in mine. Each production turn was also taking nearly 30 minutes of number crunching and planning, even using the map to coordinate my reactive defenses along with my own assault.

As I write this, I'm at the start of turn 139. I possess 50 worlds on 30 systems. Ten systems are interdicted, and one is seriously threatened. and have 3615 RP in the global pool, enough to build 30 M4 warships on any planet that isn't interdicted, though I expect quite a bit of it will be spent on building up my most recently conquered systems. Scattered around the galaxy I have over a hundred M4 warships and over a thousand transports. I have over 27 thousand victory points, and lead over my nearest rival, Player Four, by over 10 thousand, enough that I'm certain I will score a "substantial" victory no matter what, but probably not an "overwhelming" one, which is in fact is impossible once your score exceeds 32,000 (gotta love integer overflow).

There will be one more post on this, where I'll go into depth on my thought process and decision making in a late-game turn, finish the game, summarize my thoughts, and also do some versions comparison, as there were three editions of RFTS on the Apple II alone.

Reach for the Stars: A 40-turn game

Coming to grips with galactic-scale strategy packed into a 48KB machine with a largely text-based interface wasn't easy, but I've now played through a 40-turn game of Reach for the Stars with its original 1983 presentation.

Before playing, there are a number of options you can set, but I stuck with the defaults.

• There are always four players, but each can be assigned human or computer control, with three selectable AI difficulties. The most difficult, "Veteran," is the default.
• Scenario length can be 40, 80, or 150 turns.

 

Six gameplay features can be toggled on or off. All default to off.

• Novas, a randomly occurring disaster that destroys a star system, becoming more frequent as technology improves.
• Natural disasters, which impact a planet's population, industrial capacity, or social/environmental level.
• Xenophobes, parasites that may irrevocably infest a planet in orbit, disrupting interplanetary trade and meddling with the outcome of any space battles occurring there.
• Solar debris, a stellar map feature that slows down any space ships crossing it.
• Random star map will randomize the galactic layout, though there will always be 54 star systems.
• Task force set up causes all players to begin with a fleet in search of a home to settle on rather than starting with an already-settled planet.

 

Finally,  you can change the game values pertaining to what things cost, and to what achievements grant victory points. If you want to make the highest ship technology available for a song and cut the manufacturing cost in half while making space combat the only thing that gives you points, you can do that.

After setting your options, the game starts.

The basic game flow is based around two phases, Production and Movement. Odd-numbered turns have both phases, beginning with Production, in which you give build orders to all planets under your control, while even-numbered turns only have Movement, in which you form your ships into task forces and issue travel orders.

At any time, you can enter a "flickering cursor" view, one reminiscent of earlier SSI games (especially Keating's Superpower series), where you can move a white-box cursor around a scrolling 2D map of the galaxy that wraps around at the edges. The big numbers in space represent sectors, of which there are nine in total - a feature lifted from Keating's SSI games.

Unfortunately, this view is pretty badly designed. Thankfully, you don't need to rely on it too much.

The screen just doesn't give you enough information. You can see the stars' positions in relation to each other, but there is absolutely no information at a glance about any of them. After a star has been scouted, or even colonized, you've got to move your white-box cursor over it to find out its name, its planets, and whether or not you have any colonies there. A "utilities" view, from which you can access planetary and colony reports, is much more useful for that kind of querying.

Take the above screenshot. This is sector 4, and we can see that selected star system Schedar has a single planet of "Primary" quality, and five other stars are nearby. I know right now that they are unexplored, since this is the start of the game, but let's say in later turns, I am ready to send colonists from Schedar to a new planet. You simply can't tell from a glance which of these stars have been scouted, let alone explored, so you've got to manually move the cursor from Schedar to each one in sequence, which scrolls the screen, and so by the time you are querying one of the stars, you can't tell which one was Schedar.

There's also a full galaxy map, but it's not very useful either.

This late-game shot shows my fleets but not planet ownership.

I also have to critique the use of hexes in this game, as I can't see what purpose they serve here. Hexes make sense in a wargame where terrain matters, but in Reach for the Stars, it barely does. Any ship can travel from any planet to any other planet, and the only things affecting the journey are its speed and the distance from point A to point B, which is easily calculated by Pythagorean theorem on an orthogonal grid. The solar debris option complicates this a little, but BASIC Star Trek managed a grid-friendly solution to Pythagorean movement on a playfield with debris. There are no zones of control either - ships only "exist" when orbiting planets, and only engage other ships orbiting the same planet. They could have just kept the grid square-based, lost nothing, and made navigating the map much easier.

Like I said, though, you don't really need to rely on the map very much. Lists of ships, planets, and colonies are always just a few keystrokes away, and are overall much more useful than the graphical map, though these lists still leave a bit to be desired - I found Excel to be a crucial tool for keeping track of the game state. You don't have to rely on the map to select your units and planets either - at any time on the map, you can hit Enter to jump to the next planet or ship that needs orders. It's only when you need to give them tasks in a particular order that this becomes a problem.

The planetary production view looks much more complicated than it is, thanks to the fact that everything you might want to know is crammed onto one screen in numerical form. Master of Orion and Civ are considerably more complicated, but feel more manageable thanks to a more modular interface that limits how much you can do on any single screen. Here's an overview of what items on the upper half of the screen mean:

• This star system, Schedar, has a single planet of "Primary" quality, the best. The owner is player #1, me. Spectral class is a moot point for explored planets.
  
• POP 50/90 - The population is 50 points out of a maximum of 90, which can never be expanded. Population marginally affects productivity, and every transport built decreases population by a point.
  
• IND 15/40 - There are 15 factories out of a maximum of 40, which can never be expanded. Industry significantly affects productivity.
• SOC 52/70 - The planet has 15 "social points" and 70 "planet" points, which can be thought of as infrastructure and environment respectively. Both of these can be developed to a maximum of 100 points. Social points significantly affect productivity and will slowly trend towards the planetary value automatically whenever you don't invest in it. Population tends to increase when social points are high, and decrease when they're low.
• PDB 12 (*) - There are 12 planetary defense bases, which are your last defense against planetary invasion. They won't help you kill enemy warships in high orbit over your planet, but will prevent transports from landing, and if an enemy fleet bombards the planet, each PDB will fight with the strength of the best warship you've researched. PDB's are cheaper than warships up front but require maintenance fees. The asterix indicates that the planet was peacefully settled - on conquered planets, PDB's serve a different role.
  

 

A planet's productivity is measured by this formula, which is oddly missing from the manual:
2*Min(P,MF) + F*S/16

P here is population, MF the planet's maximum factory capacity, F the number of factories, and S the number of social points.

On this planet, 40 is the maximum number of factories, which P exceeds, so it gives us 80 resource points and this is as high as population-based productivity will get. The 15 factories and 52 social points will be worth 48 rounded down, for a sum of 128 points, which matches the "Planet RP's" line exactly

The planetary production summary tells us that we have a global reserve of 200 RP's available to all planets, plus this planet's 128, for a total of 328RP of immediate discretionary spending. 62 are already allocated, leaving 266 available. Anything not spent will go into the global reserve next turn, which is useful when you need resources from a developed planet to help build up a newly settled one.

The bottom half of the screen shows this turn's production orders. Confusingly, the left side (build orders) is measured in units, while the right side (research) is measured in RP's spent.

The build orders available are:

• Industry - Cost of 10RP/unit. A maximum order of 25 new factories will cost 250 RP's, but will make the planet much more productive, at 210RP/turn up from 128RP/turn, and will continue to increase as social points go up.
• Explorer - Cheap, fast scout ships, cost of 3RP/unit. No combat ability whatsoever, but important early on. Maximum output capacity of 5 per turn.
  
• Transport - Cost of 5RP/unit plus one population. Mainly used to resettle colonists or to land invasion forces on enemy planets. You may never build an amount in one turn greater than 25% of the population. Surprisingly okay combat ability in numbers, but don't expect miracles.
  
• Mark I - Basic warships. Cost of 14RP/unit. Better warships are unlocked through research and cost more accordingly.
  

Research orders available are:

• Social level at 4RP/point. 100RP/turn is always the largest investment allowed, adding 25 social points.
• Planet level at 8RP/point. Again, 100RP/turn is always the largest allowed, granting 12-13 planet points.
• Ship development for unlocking better warships. 100RP/turn is the maximum allowed per planet, points invested are cumulative and unlock the Mark II, Mark III, and Mark IV ships at 400, 1000, and 2000 points. Unlocking them also improves your PDB's.
  
• Planetary defense is automatically set to the minimum needed to maintain PDB's. Spending more than this will purchase new PDB's at a cost of 4RP/unit. Spending less will cause your stock to decline.
• Service population is also set automatically to the amount needed to maintain your population. There's no point in spending more than this. The manual warns that bad things will happen if you spend any less.
  

I decided to take a risk and de-invest in PDB's, expecting that I could jumpstart my economy that much faster by allowing them to decay now, and buy them back later. I also bought the maximum amount of explorers allowed. Math that I won't go into tells me that to maximize resource points next turn, I should buy 16 factories and spend the rest on social development, but this math assumes that the resulting social value of 77 won't decay too much from exceeding the planet value of 70. Three points are unspent and will be available next production turn.

One interface hiccup here is that pressing Esc will commit your production orders, and when you do this, there is absolutely no way to change your mind short of reloading a saved game. If you wish to return to the map view to size up the situation, you must press "L" to back out. Unfortunately, in most other contexts of the game, "Esc" is used to back out of a decision while "Q" is used to commit one, and so far too often, I've unintentionally committed orders that I didn't want! Because of this, I save my game quite often.

After committing all planets, you enter the turn's movement phase.

You get ingame icons to represent orbital fleets. That's pretty much it.

The movement interface here is impressively powerful. Ships are organized into task forces, and at any time, you can reorganize the ships available at a planet into any number of new task forces. Right now I have one task force orbiting Schedar, consisting of the five explorers that I just built, but it can be split into five task forces consisting of one explorer each, which is the optimal way to use explorers.

Movement is elegantly designed too, with multiple ways of setting a task force's destination. You can use the on-screen cursor to select a star on the map, but the method I use the most is to type in the destination name. It even has autocomplete - type "PR" and it immediately jumps to Procyon, while you'll need to type "CAPH" or "CAPE" to select Caph or Capella.

For explorers, though, there's an even simpler option - press Ctrl+X and the AI takes over this boring task by splitting the explorers up into individual task forces and sending each one to the nearest unexplored star.

Five explorers en route to five new planets. They should all be reached next turn.

At the end of each movement phase I always take stock of my task forces and their destinations, especially explorers, because RFTS does an awful job of showing you what happens in between turns. Your explorers have no combat ability at all, and if they encounter any non-explorer ships, they'll be immediately destroyed in an animation that zips by so quickly that you might not even notice it happening, let alone process information such as where it happened and by who.

Guys, this is really not helpful.

 

Basically, if at the beginning of one turn, you seem to be missing an explorer, that probably means there's an enemy colony at the star where it was headed to last turn.

Speaking of which, you'll also need to take notes on enemy colonies whenever they're spotted. The game doesn't make it obvious when this happens - a "colony report" which you must manually select to view only lists enemy colonies when you have unopposed ships in their orbit, and should you withdraw these ships or lose them in battle, there's no persistence of memory; they'll appear to be explored but unoccupied whenever you are not directly observing them. So, take notes on where explorers vanish, where combat occurs, and review the reports every single turn.

Afterward, the turn is ended with the Ctrl+E combination, and turn 2 begins.

The explorers moved in a star pattern. All of them made it, this time.

Turn 2, being even, has no production phase, so there's nothing to do but move my explorers again, but first I checked the reports. As I could see from the screenshot, all five ships arrived at their destinations - the more spread out they get, the less obvious this will be from graphics alone. None were settled, but none were really worth settling. The planet report showed that Algol had two tertiary quality planets, Procyon and Wesen each a secondary, Nihal none, and Alioth a hostile planet. Earlier experience had taught me that only Primary planets are worth the bother, and the AI rarely settles for anything else. So I continued the auto-explore and ended my turn.

Results from the second turn were much better! Each one of the five explorers found a system with one planet of Primary quality. I checked on my homeworld of Schedar.

As expected, planetary production was significantly up - up to 170/turn, from its initial 128, and the social points hadn't decayed.

Once again I defunded the PDB's, and this time I put 56RP's into planetary environment to boost it to 77, bought 14 transport ships, and spent the rest on 5 factories.

For the turn's movement phase, I kept putting the explorers on auto, but I sent five of my transport ships to the newly discovered worlds, not to settle, but to stand guard. Transports won't be any use against a real invasion, but they're more useful for guarding than explorers for a number of reasons:

• Transports will destroy enemy explorers automatically.
• When a real invasion fleet arrives and encounters a transport, a space battle will occur, and even though you won't have a chance of winning, you'll at least be able to see the size of the fleet. Then you'll have a pretty good idea of what it will take to beat the fleet and conquer the planet they just took from you. But if you only have an explorer there, then there's no battle - the explorer just dies. You might not even notice it.
• It's far too easy to accidentally send guarding explorers off into space by using the auto-explore command too soon.

 

On turn 4, I noticed one of my explorers was missing. It had been en route to Acrux, which was even marked as explored, though all it had was two tertiary planets, but this told me there might be a colony there. No other newly charted planets were interesting. I kept exploring.

Space combat! One of my transports had met Player Three on the planet Gemma - evidently they got there before I did.

This display is a little confusing at first, but is simple once you know how to decipher it. Combat can potentially involve all four players, but this time it only involves players one and three, whose fleets correspond to the first and third columns. I have "fair" odds of winning, and player three has "good" odds.

Combat is based on rounds, and one round is assumed to occur automatically, after which either player may opt to withdraw their forces. The "0/1" cell for my transports shows that in the prior round, I have lost one transport, and none are left, so I've already lost. Player three has 3 Mark I warships, and hasn't lost any.

On turns 5-6, I noticed two more of my explorers missing, which had been headed to Shedir and Tarazed. I had Schedar (not to be confused with Shedir) build three more explorers to replace the ones lost, and invest in more factories and social/planetary development, while continuing to autoscout.

On turn 7, Schedar was at maximum industrial capacity and close to maximum social capacity, producing 305 RP's per turn. I finished maxing out the social/planet levels and let the rest of it go into savings, which generates interest, so that by turn 9, I could buy a respectable fleet and send them to Gemma, likely a soft and easy target. Leaving only 2 PDB's and no ships in defense was risky, but no guts, no glory.

Attack on Gemma! Here's a re-explanation of what's going on, since there's more data this time. My fleet of 20 transports and 22 Mark I warships fights Player Three's fleet of 6 Mark I warships. My odds are good, his odds are poor. In the first automatic round of combat, I've lost 2 of my transports, leaving 18, and all 22 of my Mark I warships survived, killing one of his six.

I kept at it, but he withdrew from the hopeless fight before another round could elapse, granting me two victory points and space superiority over Gemma.

Next, I have the option to attack the planet itself.

 

As I thought, it's a soft, easy target, with only 4 PDB's. I could also choose to colonize either of the inferior neighboring planets on Gemma, but why would I?

 

Planetary combat is similar to orbital combat, but only the attacker may withdraw. The third column represents the PDB's, which stand no chance against my fleet. On the next turn, I may land my surviving transports as victorious conquerors.

Because the defender can't withdraw, planetary combat really sucks when you're the one being invaded. What happens is that the computer automatically advances each round (or, rarely, withdraws), and it does this fast. Usually the entire combat will be over before you can figure out what's going on - how big the invading fleet is, what planet it happened on, who won the fight - until the next production cycle when you notice (or don't) that one of your planets is missing.

On turn 11, I declined to build anything on Schedar, allowing all of its resources to pool into the global reserve so that they could be used on Gemma the following turn. This is the only fast way to build up undeveloped planets, whether conquered or newly settled. 

Turn 13 on my newly conquered prize planet.

 

"Global RP's" represent unspent points from prior turns and may now be spent on planets that did not produce them. Since Gemma only produces 20 RP per turn on its own - not even enough to maintain my PDB's (more on that in a second), it needs this extra kick to get its own economy started so it can be self-sufficient.

Conquered worlds operate on somewhat different rules from ones settled peacefully. The original population remains, and your landed transports are converted into PDB's which serve as anti-ship bases, but also pacify the local population.

The original owner isn't forgotten, and if the population ever more than doubles the number of PDB's, they will revolt and destroy some of them. If the PDB's ever run out, whether through revolt or annihilation in battle, then the planet will revert back to control of its original owner. Furthermore, you may not buy more PDB's as you can on your own planets, though failure to pay the maintenance costs will still erode them.

However, when the population starts to get out of control relative to the PDB count, you can simply build some transports and immediately re-settle them, which simultaneously lowers the population and raises the PDB count. I'm not sure SSG thought that one all the way through.

For the next few turns, I focused on building up Gemma's economy, Schedar's defenses, and also began investing in ship R&D. Schedar began to get overpopulated, which causes rapid social and environmental decline, so I started building transports to put them on, with nowhere in particular to send them. During this time, my scouts finished exploration, and I ordered them into hostile territory to dispose of them, their purpose now complete and unworthy of my micromanagement. Meanwhile, an enemy fleet attacked my transport at Diphda, marking it as a contested world. So of course I had to take it.

And it's fairly well developed too!

A quick check at the scoreboard showed I had taken the lead, and as the only player with any conquered worlds this lead was sure to quickly expand. This also painted a big target on me, so I decided to lay off the conquering and focus on building up and defending my planets.

I launch Schedar's surplus population at its attackers, Zapp Brannigan-style.

By turn 33 I had developed all three of my worlds, unlocked Mark III warships, saved up a lavish RP pool, and had a comfortable point lead over my rivals, so I bought a whole bunch of these new warships at Schedar and sent everything to the nearby world of Shedir, which I was pretty sure was a colony, leaving PDB's behind to defend.

Craft superiority beats numbers here, though I lose a few of my M3's.

Shedir falls, at the cost of most of the remaining fleet.

I spent the rest of the game focusing on defense and build-up. Thankfully, my opponents never attacked with huge fleets - even with M3 PDB's I probably would have lost, but on the other hand, my score was so far ahead that I could have lost my homeworld and still won the game.

Now, I've got to be clear about something. Even though I beat the AI on the hardest setting, there was both luck and skill involved. I had a few not so successful runs before this one. Being aggressive early on pays off, but you can't have strong defenses on all of your planets at the same time, especially not while mounting an attack of your own. In other runs, the AI attacked my colonies, or even my initial homeworld with massive fleets, forcing withdrawals, sometimes leading to endless back-and-forth battles over the same planet, draining both of our resources quickly while the other opponents built up impenetrable fortresses. One time, all three opponents attacked my colonies at once, conquering two of them in one turn. This time, I was lucky that I never faced a credible counterattack while vulnerable to one.

That was the 40 turn game, and despite my interface gripes, my impressions are pretty positive. For my next and probably last post I'll give the full length 150 turn game a try, with most of the optional features turned on.